Posted
by
kdawsonon Friday July 23, 2010 @09:29AM
from the single-point dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Katherine Noyes writes at LinuxInsider that it may be time for Linus Torvalds to share more of the responsibility for Linux that he's been shouldering. 'If Linux wants to keep up with the competition there is much work to do, more than even a man of Linus's skill [can] accomplish,' argues one user. The 'scalability of Linus' is the subject of a post by Jonathan Corbet wondering if there might there be a Linus scalability crunch point coming. 'The Linux kernel development process stands out in a number of ways; one of those is the fact that there is exactly one person who can commit code to the "official" repository,' Corbet writes. A problem with that scenario is the potential for repeats of what Corbet calls 'the famous "Linus burnout" episode of 1998' when everything stopped for a while until Linus rested a bit, came back, and started merging patches again. 'If Linus is to retain his central position in Linux kernel development, the community as a whole needs to ensure that the process scales and does not overwhelm him,' Corbet adds. But many don't agree. 'Don't be fooled that Linus has to scale — he has to work hard, but he is the team captain and doorman. He has thousands doing most of the work for him. He just has to open the door at the appropriate moment,' writes Robert Pogson, adding that Linus 'has had lots of practice and still has fire in his belly.'"

The problem is not if it will die. Linux itself will likely live on. The question lies in what will ultimately happen to it. There needs to be a succession path, even if it's just that Linus keeps 100% of the control while he's on work, and passes it off only when he gets burnt out or worse.

Supposing he does get hit by a bus, there will be months of infighting as big egos clash trying to decide who gets control of the kernel. There'll be those who think the official repository should be managed by committee, those saying the single person structure maintained. The subsequent fight will blow out of proportion which will generate many forks and ultimately and dangerously you will end up with uncertainty.

The best outcome is that there's a plan in place for exactly this kind of situation. That way Linux can remain what Linus wants it's to be in case of his demise rather than to throw it to the dogs and then see what's left over after the frenzy dies.

Supposing he does get hit by a bus, there will be months of infighting as big egos clash trying to decide who gets control of the kernel.

Respectfully, this isn't what I see happening. Linus seems to be a nose-to-the-grindstone pragmatist and the only person who hopes to succeed him will not arrive through politics. The currently official kernel organization might collapse in bickering if Linus gets hit by a bus, but the true workers will quickly find someone like Linus to quietly organize their efforts and

And due to the GPL license that's no problem at all: you can own your own tree as soon as you want and be as zelous or as liberal as you want with it.

No, you can't. The GPL places limits on both liberalness and zealotry.

The license prohibits liberalness, because you are only allowed to share source code under strict conditions. It prohibits zealotry, because it ensures that others are free to fork a project and not bow to your vision of a project.

"The license prohibits liberalness, because you are only allowed to share source code under strict conditions. It prohibits zealotry, because it ensures that others are free to fork a project and not bow to your vision of a project."

Never the less he and he alone maintains the reference kernel source. That's a potential problem. Or- explain to me why it isn't.

Never the less he and he alone maintains the reference kernel source. That's a potential problem. Or- explain to me why it isn't.

It is only the reference insofar that distributions tend to work off of it. It would be just as easy for them technically to use a random other git tree as the reference, if they chose to do so. However, Linus is doing such a good job these days that non-enterprise distributions just stick with his sources + a limited set of patches. If he stops doing a good job (like in the hit-by-bus scenario which seems so popular), there are several well-maintained trees to pick from, and Linux would only be a little worse off.

The most important advantage of Linus is that his decisions are almost universally respected. It would be difficult even for David Miller and Alan Cox to get the same universal buy-in, and Andrew Morton is possibly too nice for the job.

The license prohibits liberalness, because you are only allowed to share source code under strict conditions.

What in the hell are you talking about? The GPL restricts your ability to share binary-only versions of your tree. It explicitly requires you to *always* share your source code when you are making a public release. There are no limitations at all.

You're not kidding. In the United Arab Emirates, some clever marketoids are selling MP5 players. I've tried explaining to someone from there that what they actually own is an MP3 player, but I made limited progress. They just kept insisting "no - it's an MP5 player".

Linus is at the top now because he does a very good job and people trust him. The actual development is done by thousands of developers (around 3000 contributors / release currently), number increasing. It sales just fine.

The way he is accomplishing this, is by using a network of trust (he talk about it in his talk about git [youtube.com]).

This is very scalable, as he is not actually checking out every peace of code, he just merges them.

What would happen if he would suddenly go crazy or hit by a bus? The answer is simple: one of the core maintainers, like for instance Andrew Morton would take over the position. General development would continue as it is now, as Linus talked often about how and why he runs things the way he does, and many people agree with him there.

If? You say this as though it isn't inevitable. Linus could be hit by a bus tomorrow, or (more likely) die of cancer in 10 years. He could even retire from the project! Either way, there will eventually be an end to his influence.

I was originally going to write "UK English" but settled on English English as a joke. It's just as correct as "American English".

Fair questions.. let's ask a guy who is Scottish and lives in Scotland, shall we?

Me: Hi, Somersault!Me: Hello there, you handsome devil!Me: Yeah, whatever. What do you think of all this "English English" stuff you were saying earlier?Me: I find it amusing.Me: Oh, I see!Me: Yep.Me: Well, bye!Me: Bye.

Heh. I kind of like the completely random asides you get on Slashdot. It's like the Simpsons, start on one plot for a couple of minutes and then swing on a wild tangent. At least that's what I remember it always doing.

So the "and when" logically equates to "or when", both of which are completely pointless additions to the if, but the "and when" still somehow manages to make it sound like the speaker or writer believes that the situation is actually inevitable, something they've only just realised after saying "if"..

Actually, thinking about it logically I suppose the actual meaning of the structure does in fact simply equate to "if".

It really doesn't.

It is closer to equating simply to "when", with a specific acknowledgement that the trigger may not occur. It differs from "if" because the structure "if X then Y" says nothing about the temporal relationship between X and Y.

"When X, Y" states a temporal relationship.

"If and when X, Y" likewise states a temporal relationship but calls attention to the possibility that X m

Maybe I should. I've just noticed that at least in programming parlance, you could really use "if" and "when" interchangeably.. in fact you can do it in normal language too, but when just seems more applicable if or when you know something is inevitable.

"If and when..." is a common idiom in (US?) English. It's not supposed to be read literally.

Its occasionally used imprecisely to mean "if" or "when", which seem to be the not-literal readings you suggest it is "supposed" to have, but its most common use seems to be fairly literal and precise, and to mean "if [event occurs], then, when [event occurs]."

It addresses the fact that "if" alone doesn't indicate that the result is proximal in time to the trigger, and "when" alone can imply that the trigger is certa

The 'if and when' idiom does make literal sense. It means 'when it happens, if it does happen'. Your interpretation, in binary logic, would be 'if or when', not 'if and when'. (If 'A and B', and 'A' is false, then 'A and B' is false also. The 'B' doesn't render the 'A' part moot.)

Sure, but the A part does render the B part moot, so in spoken/written language the fact that you've added in the B part makes it seem like the "and" must have some relevance. That's how it always seemed to me at least - wasn't until today that I tried thinking about this phrase logically to see that it does just equate to "if".

OK, whatever. The when means 'at that time'. I could find examples where from context it means either 'not earlier' or 'not later' or both. In the present example, I think it means both, since we don't need the fork now even though Linus will disappear eventually.

The way my own brain perceives the nuances of "if and when" still naturally just makes me think someone is implying something that will definitely happen at some point because of the "and when", even though taken as a whole the sentence means the exact opposite. And the differing ways that people have been using and interpreting it here shows that this is an idiom that only serves to confuse.

"If" doesn't have any links to time - if could happen today, it could happen in 20 years, it might never happen. It c

You seem to be saying that "If foo, then" indicates a certain imminence of the chance of foo, whereas "If and when foo, then" indicates a less imminent chance of foo. I don't think this is necessarily true; that is, I don't think the "If" in "If and when foo" has any connotations about the imminence of the foo.

Best all round solution != Best possible all round solution. And there should be a little more planning for the "hit-by-a-bus" scenario. No sane developer would want that sort of single-point-of-failure in a system they develop...why are they willing to accept it when it's wet-ware instead of hardware/software? There needs to be a succession plan, period. That's the bigger issue imo. The scaling thing? That might be a bonus, it may be unnecessary, I surely don't know. But acting like the status quo i

Any fork would either immediately or very quickly suffer from the same fate.

People like Alan Cox and Marcelo Tosatti have maintained well-established patchsets of their own, comprised of the features they happen to think are important. This is part of the natural order of things ("managing senior programmers is like herding cats" - Dave Platt) and not to be discouraged.

Given that, in practice, virtually every distro maintains its own kernel, or set of patches, to suit their needs, I don't really see the big deal.

As long as Linus is performing his role of keeping the "official" repository basically the easiest and most standard starting point, all the peripheral kernel tweaks maintained by other entities will cluster more or less closely around it for cost reasons.

If he starts to slip, the center of gravity will shift toward one of the distro kernel repositories, or whatever other third party is doing the best job of filling the role, and the "official" repository will fade in prominence a bit.

Because of how kernel code is licensed, the "official" repository could either come back quickly(if Linus or his chosen successor get back on the ball, they could update from the prior leader, and start taking the comit lead again), or it could just fade away, mostly, and development could center around the RedHat tweak of the kernel, or the Debian one, or whatever...

More dangerous are situations(like the X11/X.org one) where there is a major licensing split that actually requires a decisive move one way or the other. Linux graphics are certainly not its strongest suit; but, had the defection to X.org not been so complete, things there could have been a lot uglier today.

What you descibe was the way kernels were being handled in the early 2000's. The 2.5.X kernels were getting all the dev time, and the distros were back porting fixes. You are right though, if the Linus branch starts slipping, a distro or some other maintainer branch will become the "base" branch. The way it is right now there are several branches I could follow/use if i wanted to.
[N] sys-freebsd/freebsd-sources (--): FreeBSD kernel sources
[N] sys-kernel/cell-sources (--): Full sources including the cell/

He realized that charity was a much better ego-booster than being the much-maligned head of a big corporation.

Wow! Some people just can't win, can they? Get involved in big charity work, you're just feeding your ego. Anyway, those were some pretty strong words about Linus that you kicked off this discussion with. I take it you either know him personally or have worked with him fairly closely?

If you don't want to have your charity work belittled as ego-driven then don't name your foundation after yourself. "The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" doesn't exactly scream "Modest" or "We're only in it to help people."

Arrogant people who achieve power never give it up voluntarily. They hold onto every little bit of it for dear life.

Why must a pet project, the owner from inception, held in high regard around the entire world, which has provided both personal and professional benefit, as well as providing much prestige, be attributed to arrogance? Unless your Buddhist or some such thing, most reasonable people would argue you're foolish to give up such a thing until your damn well ready.

Really, in exchange for giving up all that, what does it get in exchange? Nothing aside from more free time, as far as I can tell.

Because it doesn't happen. It's an extremely rare person that ends up the head of an organization without being a psychopath. Ever notice the behavior of CEOs? Justifying the ridiculously huge pay packages because other CEOs get it? And worse are the ones that demand it even when they're not anywhere near average. Most well adjusted people just don't want to be the head, the higher up you go past the low levels of management the worse it gets.

Well, last I checked AI development hasn't come so far that it can stand on its own and orphanages and foster homes are hardly considered the ideal way to grow up. Reality is that even though Linus does all the final commits to his tree, he most of the time pulls it on request by subsystem and driver and arch maintainers - it's not like one man reads every line of code. Changes to core code perhaps, but that's a very small part. That system of maintainers wouldn't go away if Linus was hit by a bus, most lik

I'll take your assertions with a (big) pinch of salt: remember Linus *created* a distributed version management tool (git) when he couldn't use anymore BitKeeper..And the nice thing about DVCS is that anybody can have his own tree..

So yes, Linus is the ultimate authority about what goes in his own tree, but this is quite normal..

Most of the bitching and moaning about Linus seems to be along the lines of "he didn't accept my patch" or "he tore me a new one for suggesting something", not "Linux sucks, I'm going to use HURD or FreeBSD instead". And that's an important distinction, because Linus' primary goal is to make Linux and its codebase as awesome as it can be, not stroke developer's egos.

So yeah, if you write up something that you think is a great memory management scheme that Linus decides isn't the best approach, you're going to be pissed at him, because you thought very carefully about it and worked very hard to create a patch. But that doesn't mean Linus is necessarily wrong, and also doesn't mean he's arrogant - it means he thinks there's better choices available. He's picking not from the best that you can come up with, but from the best that the much larger set of people who've ever considered this problem can come up with.

Having people working under your supervision adds to your power, does not divide it. This is a basic management principle. Bosses that don't delegate tasks can only stagnate when they reach their physical limits. Unfortunately many managers are too stupid to understand this.

The Linux kernel is open source. Anyone who thinks they can do better can just clone it in git and start their own fork. You don't have to replace Linus, you can just be your own kernel maintainer. There's no part of the mainline Linux kernel development that takes place in private, so you can even "play Linus" and just merge only the patches that you like from the kernel mailing list into your own personal tree.

The kernel that Linus releases is not meant to be used directly by end users. Distributions are responsible for integrating the kernel into their operating systems as they see fit. They can choose to track Linus' tree closely or not at all. Red Hat, for example, rolls their own kernel that bears little resemblance to any of Linus'.

Linus' tree is widely regarded as the official Linux kernel mainly because he invented it and has stuck to his vision of how the kernel should be developed over the past 18 years or so. Most of the top developers and open source companies trust Linus and his management over the mainline kernel. Many have been around from the very beginning. Suggesting that they would "dump" Linus as the core maintainer is outright laughable.\

Linus' Tree is *still* the official one not because of Linus, he could be replaced overnight and it would continue, it's because all the main contributors submit their patches to it, and the official kernel group analyse them before they are integrated, the all Linus actually needs to do is be the one person who actually commits patches (so there are no conflicts) and act as a final arbiter in disputes

As the final arbiter it does not matter if he is arbitary, egotistical etc... as long as he only acts as the final arbiter, the majority rules, he just need to decide when opinion is split...

Arrogant people who achieve power never give it up voluntarily. They hold onto every little bit of it for dear life. Torvalds would no more voluntarily give up his ultimate authority than he would jump off a cliff. You can make all the reasonable arguments in the world, it's not going to change who he is. Linux is his baby and he's a jealous parent.

Interestingly, humble but smart people would end up in the same situation : they know that arrogant and power-hungry people are there and want power for the sake of their ego. I don't know if Linus is humble or arrogant, but he gave up power a long time ago when he put his OS under an open-source licence. He has never hidden the fact that he was a "benevolent dictator" (some even say the expression comes from his second surname : Benedict). If Linus is a bottleneck and slows down kernel development, there will be a fork. Right now, as much as people say he is a problem, he is still the only solution available.

What is good about open-source is that you can say to power-hungry people "Want to be the boss of a team ? Well go find a team that will respect your work !".

Interestingly, humble but smart people would end up in the same situation : they know that arrogant and power-hungry people are there and want power for the sake of their ego. I don't know if Linus is humble or arrogant, but he gave up power a long time ago when he put his OS under an open-source licence. He has never hidden the fact that he was a "benevolent dictator" (some even say the expression comes from his second surname : Benedict). If Linus is a bottleneck and slows down kernel development, there w

read Mythical Man Month. If you do you will discover that most successful software projects have one central strong lead. An analogy would be if you are having surgery would you want 5 surgeons in charge of it, all with different opinions and arguing while you are on the table on how to do it?

...he is an arrogant idealist who tell stupid people with stupid ideas to fuck off.

Some of the people he tells to fuck off are stupid, some are not. Some of the ideas he shits on are stupid, some are not. I seen plenty of times on LKML where he is dismissive and insulting only to later actually look at the ideas in detail and then accept them. The acceptance is sometimes in the form of repackaging the idea by a different, more favored developer so that there is never a need to acknowledge the original contributor may have been right.

And yet some of this behavior is required to keep things going as well as it has. Just imagine a day in his life, a mix of technical issues, coordination, flames and people wanting attention because they think their idea is the best. That's assuming you ignore personal issues and demands for time.

I don't have anywhere near his skills / reputation / influence / pressure, and the days when I have to fend off multiple groups of people demanding time, technical issues, and balance that with my schedule are dra

He may not be perfect, but he is by far the best "leader" (whether project or corporate) that I've *ever* seen. He may be insulting, but he does it to everyone to scare off the timid and to make people reconsider their ideas. He is extremely technically competent and humble, two traits which are invaluable in a technical manager. Something you may want to read: Linux Kernel Management Style [kernel.org].

No. The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing.

Already, most distros maintain slightly forked versions of the kernel, to suit their needs(ie. enterprise-ish ones like RedHat might do more driver backports, MontaVista introduces BSPs for a variety of oddball boards, etc.) Because novelty costs money, people don't generally go further from mainline than they have a good justification for; but there are already dozens of quiet, not-very-adversarial, slight forks floating around, mostly in the hands of the various distros, and some of the embedded engineering houses.

"No. The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing."

Linus Torvalds don't see that problem. Kernel is not moving from GPLv2 just because he doesn't want to. The day Linus wants to move to GPLv3 (if) he will just do so together with a public anouncement of the change. Whoever finds entitled ownership to a piece of code will be free

The kernel is(at this point, whether anybody likes it or not) basically GPL2 permanently. Without any "copyright assignment" requirement to some organization, there are just too many interlocking owners for any re-licensing.

I wonder how feasible it would be to ask people to voluntarily reassign their copyrights to some entity, so that the kernel (or their parts?) could be updated to GPL3. Can parts of the work even be licensed in separate ways like that?

Anybody would be perfectly free to chase down a contributor and ask them to offer their contribution under different terms(or buy it from them and offer it themselves). The issue is just that there are a lot of contributors, including some who may be virtually impossible to get ahold of(releases under GPL2, dies, copyright is still owned by estate, who could sue your ass; but estate doesn't even know that the copyright exists, until mony-grubbing grandson graduates from law school and goes hunting, or any

Do you even know who Jonathan Corbet is? Among other things, he created LWN.net, has been a Linux kernel contributor for longer than that, and has written books on Linux kernel development (for example, the O'Reilly "Linux Device Drivers" book).

He's been on the inside for a long time. This is an opinion you should at least respect, even if in the end you disagree.

The things about whining bloggers is there's a lot of them, and eventually one of them raises an important point. So if Linus dies tomorrow, just what will happen? Will the official kernel be run by committee? Will it be managed by the alpha dick from the ensuing ego battle for the top job? Will the community be fundamentally fractured losing the official repository?

Who cares? If Linus stops updating his repository tomorrow, we'll all just switch to whatever repository meets our needs.

It's only consensus that says that Linus' repository is the "official" one.

There are already plenty of people who track Andrew Morton's repository instead of Linus', so if Linus went away, it's not like we don't already have a tested mechanism to allow us to track "unofficial" repositories.